music
Since its birth as "Future Splash" back in 1996, Flash has always been a great tool for creating low-bandwidth vector animations for personal and professional websites. As the Internet has matured, so has Flash. Now, six years and five versions later, Flash is much more than a savvy vector animator. It is a full-blown application for multimedia authoring, on both CD-ROM and the Web. I'll be on "The Screen Savers" Monday to demonstrate the coolest features of Flash MX. Same family, same interface With this latest release of Flash, Macromedia has upheld its longstanding tradition of meaningful software updates. One of the most obvious changes to Flash MX is the new, incredibly usable and efficient integrated interface. This new interface convention is shared with the rest of the MX product family : Dreamweaver MX, Fireworks MX, and ColdFusion MX. The MX interface makes it easier than ever to transition from one application to the next. New feature: loading external sound files One of the most compelling new features of Flash MX is its ability to load external MP3 sound files. Rather than include a sound or group of sounds in your movie, you can now leave them outside your movie and call them in as needed. This approach presents several advantages: 1. Since sounds always tend to add to the size of your final SWF file, keeping them outside the final movie will allow it to be smaller. This can help a final movie load more quickly. 2. Since external files cut down significantly on file size, you'll be able to use a library of sounds that your audience will be able to choose from. If they want to watch your movie while listening to classical music, ska, or Western swing, you can give them a host of files to choose from and load the appropriate soundtrack for each visitor. 3. External sounds can be loaded into a Flash MX movie from any location on the Internet. This means that it's also possible to use Flash to create a forum for MP3 playback.